In a poignant letter to his sister from Mianyang prison in southwestern China, Tibetan poet Tashi Rabten, popularly known as Theurang, asks: "Are there any people more unfortunate than the Tibetans who have their pens snatched away and smashed? I was persecuted for the crime of 'wrong pen-bearing' and 'improper speech.'" He then expresses his unflinching resolve to resist and write against authoritarianism by affirming that radical freedom resides in the realm of the mind, unbreakable by iron fetters.
Released after four years of imprisonment in 2014, Theurang's letter echoes Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn's powerful statement on the persecution of literature. Solzhenitsyn, who remains a powerful influence on Tibetan writers and intellectuals, declared in his 1970 Nobel lecture that it is "the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory" when the literature of that nation is "cut short by the intrusion of force." Theurang recognises literature and the Tibetan language as the lifeline of the nation's existence and the source of his strength to confront the brutal conditions of life in prison. Much like Solzhenitsyn in Soviet Russia, Theurang describes the everyday trials and tribulations inside China's prison industrial complex through his poems scribbled on the backs of cigarette packets and toilet paper. Avalanche (2017) is a collection of over a hundred free-verse poems he penned in the infamous Mianyang prison. He reveals in the afterword, "These poems were conceived and crafted while I was in that unique locale of fear and ferocity, where food tasted insipid and clothes long lost their warmth."
For Tibetans today, literature remains a powerful instrument of resistance and an expression of political aspiration. Theurang belongs to an intrepid band of Tibetan poets and novelists who have deployed the power of poetry and literature to the service of resistance and writing against colonialism. The following translations from Theurang's body of work demonstrate the evocative, and at times violent, effect of his poetry, moving from ecological wreckage inflicted upon contemporary Tibet to a nostalgia for a lost nation, creating at all times an intimacy that demands from its readers both imagination and empathy.
In translating the following poems, I have employed a literalist, even word-by-word, approach as the first step, followed by an attempt at 'making' the renderings of the new language readable and enjoyable. The task of poetic translation is exacting as it expects the translator to 'create poems' in the target language and make it aesthetically appealing. I do not claim to have a theory of translation nor do I think there is a 'correct' method of poetic translation. Yet learning about the specific contexts of literary production and the poet aids the translator in imagining the 'affective equivalents' and the artistic impulse behind the works in translation.